In the first season of Game of Thrones, the Stark motto was the recurring refrain: “Winter is coming.” As we enter the third season, the warnings have gotten even more ominous: “Death is coming, for everyone and everything.”

After months of teasers, behind-the-scenes featurettes, still images, and posters, we finally have our first real look at some footage from the third season of the HBO fantasy series. A new trailer premiered on Jimmy Kimmel Live Friday night, and while it’s only 60 seconds long it’s certainly enough to get fans excited all over again. Check it out after the jump.

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There’s a pivotal scene in the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones in which the spiteful royal Joffrey (Jack Gleeson) orders his traumatized betrothed to get an eyeful of the decapitated heads he’s used to decorate the castle walls. A couple of the faces are ones familiar to poor Sansa (Sophie Turner). But one of the others is more likely to have been recognized by viewers watching at home, because it looks an awful lot like former president George W. Bush — as producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss themselves pointed out in a DVD commentary.

While the pair have insisted that the model’s likeness to Bush is “not a political statement,” unsurprisingly, the choice to use a Bush lookalike rubbed some folks the wrong way. HBO and the producers have since issued apologies, promising to scrub the head from future DVDs. Read their comments after the jump.

Briefly: How does one write a “plausible” Stretch Armstong movie? Recall, if you will, that for a few years Universal and Relativity were working to make a film based on the old Mattel toy (rights for which eventually went to Hasbro) that was basically a big guy who, uh, stretched. Think of Marvel’s Mr. Fantastic, only as a beefy wrestler type, rather than a scientist.

Prior attempts to make a film, one featuring Taylor Lautner, went nowhere, and now Relativity and Hasbro have hired Dean Georgaris (The Manchurian Candidate remake, Paycheck) to script what Variety reports will be a “plausible, action oriented family pic” rather than the cartoonish live-action version that was planned for Lautner. The film has a release date of April 11, 2014, but evidently little else. Good luck, guys!

Paramount, meanwhile, has hired David Stem and David Weiss (The Smurfs) to write The Ringling Brothers. We’ve known that a film has been in development about the seven brothers who were founders of the circus they dubbed ‘The Greatest Show on Earth,’ and THR says that this script has been ordered as “a family adventure in the spirit of Night at the Museum and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” The only other detail is that the story will be set in the present, which is interesting.

A couple months ago it was revealed that Paramount was working on a computer animated movie based on the popular classic trippy 80’s cartoon series The Smurfs (Truth is that the Smurfs are actually 50 years old, having first appeared in comic strips). Well it turns out that producer Jordan Kerner (Charlotte’s Web), who obtained the rights to the Smurfs property in 2002, has also gotten a hybrid live-action Smurfs feature film greenlit at Sony. For those of you wondering what live-action hybrid means, think Alvin and the Chipmunks. Its not clear if Paramount will still be going ahead with their 3D computer animated feature or not. J. David Stem and David Weiss, the guys who wrote the last two Shrek films, are in negotiations to write the screenplay. Studio head Amy Pascal and chairman-CEO Michael Lynton both feel “that there was potentially a series of films in the making.” I’m sure they do. A series of films means more money. A computer animated Smurfs film had me much more excited than this newly announced hybrid. It seems clear to me that the idea was probably a result of Alvin and the Chipmunks big box office success. The world of the Smurfs is interesting, magical and fantastical. Giving the characters realism and sticking them in a live action world with humans could ruin the whole appeal. I cant see the reason for them doing a live action hybrid unless The Smurfs are somehow forced to leave Mushroom Village. And it seems that kind of plot could be disastrous.